FreeRice: Vocabulary Building for the Tummy and the Brain

Sometimes people across the dinner party table tell me that I’m smart, so I don’t share the fact that I only scored 400+ on Verbal on my SATs. I don’t tell them that I didn’t grow up with a dictionary on a stand, or that my mother didn’t read to me when I was young (though I did read The Giving Tree to her). I also don’t tell them that I still have to use a thesaurus ... a lot. Instead, I tell them about FreeRice, which is not the kind we might all put into our tummies, but is the kind we can put into our brains.

FreeRice.com is a simple solution to combating poverty and ignorance. It starts with food and finishes with education. A custom database spurts out words, strengthening my synapses in varying stages of difficulty. Depending on how I do in my initial answers to vocabulary questions, FreeRice adjusts and assigns an accurate starting word for my level, and the more I play, the more control I have on where my level begins. For example, when I answer incorrectly, I move to an easier level, but when I guess three words correctly in a row, I move up to the next stage. This is where vocabulary building starts to take effect, where I reach the outer levels of my vocabulary. For the MENSA lovers out there, you might make it to the fifty-fifth level, but FreeRice says that the rest of us usually only make it to forty-eight.

The best part is that after I work out my vocabulary, FreeRice donates rice to impoverished families in the world. Partnered with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), their advertisers at the bottom of the vocabulary screen pay for the rice. I earn twenty grains of rice each time I play, and the advertisers then donate what I earn to the WFP, who then distribute it. Since the WFP operates in over seventy-five countries and is the world’s largest food agency, I know that by building my vocabulary, I’m also focusing on the greater good. And the United Nations reports that around 25,000 people die every day from hunger or hunger-related causes, so I now plan a weekly stop on FreeRice in order to help.